Ashley Smith’s speech and debate team is planning a tournament Friday, but members of the team are having trouble communicating because of the University’s mid-semester switching of e-mail services.”I felt like changing in the middle of the semester is beyond ridiculous,” said the mass communication junior. “It seems like college bureaucracy, like ‘We’re going to do this now, and it’s not going to affect the people who are changing.'”Several students are experiencing similar problems because of the transition from Outblaze e-mail to Gmail, Google’s e-mail service. The transition began Jan. 28. It broke students, faculty and staff into groups, and is moving in alphabetical order.Sheri Thompson, Information Technology Communications and Planning officer, said more than 38,000 TigerMail accounts need to be activated. She said the transition team activates 3,000 accounts daily.”The transition process is really straightforward,” Thompson said. “There haven’t been any bugs or problems. We’re doing it in stages to make sure no problems occur.”TigerMail accounts have been created. The transition team activates a group each day, Thompson said.Thompson said ITS knows how to avoid potential problems because they have undergone a mass switch of e-mail accounts when the University switched to Outblaze.Bethany Blackson, English sophomore, said she was skeptical of the switch, but the process flowed well for her, though she did not know her old e-mails  would not transfer over automatically”Gmail is a free service,” Thompson said. “The only cost is the cost of people and time to make the transition.”Thompson said she does not have an official count of how many accounts have been activated, nor does she have an estimate of the cost of the switch.”I think the phasing is kind of weird,” said Mark Slavich, marketing senior. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s odd having one person switch one day and someone else the next … I just don’t like it.”—-Contact Stephen Powell at [email protected]